Pragmatic is the study of how people use language in different contexts. It deals with the ambiguity of language, how to disambiguate meaning, and how to communicate effectively. Pragmatics is often seen as a subset of semantics, but it is more than that. There is formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical and applied pragmatics; experimental, clinical and neuropragmatics; intercultural and international pragmatics, and even historical pragmatics.
The word ‘pragmatic’ derives from the Latin pragma, meaning “practical,” and the Greek prassein, or “to do.” It is related to the adverb pragmatic, which means “so as to be useful.” Pragmatism is a philosophy that holds that most philosophical topics–such as knowledge, language, and belief–are best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes. Pragmatism also stresses that knowledge is tentative and that we can never be fully certain of anything.
Pragmatism developed in the United States and is often credited to Charles Sanders Peirce, along with 20th-century contributors such as John Dewey and William James. It is often seen as a reaction against ordinary empiricism, which only seeks to explain sensations in isolation. Radical pragmatists, such as Peirce and Dewey, sought to give a place for meaning and value in experience, rather than explaining them away as subjective additions to a world of whizzing atoms.
In the early days of pragmatism, philosophers tended to focus on semantics and the relationship between language and thought. However, in the 20th century, a variety of other topics were added to pragmatism’s agenda, including ethics, epistemology, linguistics, psychology, and sociology. Today, pragmatism is usually thought of as an epistemology.
A ‘pragmatic’ person tries to find solutions that work in real-world situations, and is willing to compromise for the sake of achieving results. This is an approach that is often associated with a lack of emotion, and it can also mean being willing to take risks in order to achieve goals.
It is important for those who are pragmatic to know that they should be flexible, adaptable and willing to compromise. Pragmatism is often described as a “middle way” between idealism and realism, and it can be difficult for those who are highly idealistic to be pragmatic at times.
The boundaries between Semantics and Pragmatics are not clearly defined, but it is generally agreed that semantics involves a complete account of sentence meaning for the language, while pragmatics focuses on how sentences are used to convey information in context. This can involve considerations such as the role of conversational implicatures, attributional meanings, the determination of referents, the relationship between semantic and lexico-grammatical knowledge, the interpretation of ambiguous expressions, and other issues that are outside the scope of purely semantic analysis.